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RIO DE JANEIRO — Chilean authorities yesterday exhumed the body of Pablo Neruda as part of a probe into whether the Nobel Prize-winning poet was murdered in the bloody aftermath of the country’s 1973 military coup.

Doubts have surrounded the death of Neruda, who passed away 12 days after military forces led by Augusto Pinochet overthrew the administration of the poet’s friend, socialist President Salvador Allende. While Neruda was suffering from prostate cancer at the time, his then-driver believes he may have been poisoned in a Santiago clinic because of his allegiance to the toppled government.

Authorities, acting on a court order, removed Neruda’s corpse from the poet’s Isla Negra home, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and transported it to the capital, Santiago, a two-hour drive inland. There, forensic experts will try to determine the cause of death.

Neruda is the latest South American luminary whose remains have been dug up as authorities probe the region’s past, looking mainly to uncover crimes committed by the military dictatorships that ruled much of the region during the Cold War. In addition to Neruda, the remains of two other opponents of Pinochet’s — Allende and former President Eduardo Frei Montalva — have been disinterred. Pinochet’s 17-year regime killed about 3,000 opponents and tortured thousands more.

In the case of Allende, a Santiago court confirmed last year that he committed suicide while Pinochet’s forces stormed the presidential palace, dispelling suggestions that he may have been murdered. Meanwhile, traces of mustard gas were found in 2007 in the corpse of Frei, upending accounts that he died in 1982 of an infection contracted during a surgery.

In Brazil, the family of former President Joao Goulart, who was overthrown in a 1964 military coup, last month authorized his exhumation from a grave in Argentina to investigate the suspicion that he was poisoned in 1976.

Neruda was elected to Chile’s Senate in 1945 on a Communist Party ticket and cited his political leanings in his 1971 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.